A text file called a robots.txt file is used to specify which webpages of your website design, search engine crawlers should and shouldn’t visit. These directives are communicated by allowing or disallowing crawler actions. A file called Robots.txt is used to instruct search engine spiders not to index certain websites or parts of a website. Most significant search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, are familiar with and adhere to Robots.txt commands.
Why Is It Important?
A robots.txt file is typically not required for websites. This is due to the possibility that Google will frequently recognize and index all of your website’s key pages. Additionally, they will automatically remove duplicate or pointless pages from their indexing.
Break up private pages On occasion, your website can have pages that you don’t want search engines to index. For instance, a page can have a staging version. There is also a login page. These pages carry a lot of weight. But you don’t want strangers to stumble across them. In this case, you would use robots.txt to prevent bots and search engine crawlers from accessing particular pages. Robots.txt allows Googlebot to focus more of your crawl budget on the pages that are crucial by banning unimportant pages.
Stay away from the Resource Index Meta directives can be used to prevent pages from being indexed just as effectively as Robots.txt. budget for stumbling Generally speaking, a search spider will visit a website with a pre-determined “allowance” for the number of pages it will crawl or the amount of time/resources it will devote, depending on the authority, size, and reputation of the website as well as how quickly the server responds.
Consider focusing on the crucial parts of your website
Rather than trying to prevent search engines from “spending” their time on the less-important parts of your site if you think your website has crawl budget concerns.
Use Scour Web’s SEO’s crawl cleanup settings to help Google crawl the crucial pages. It may occasionally be useful to stop search engines from crawling problematic portions of the site when a site needs a lot of SEO cleanup. Once you have cleared everything up, you can let them back in.
Robots.txt optimization for SEO The content of your website will determine how you should optimize the robots.txt file. You can benefit from robots.txt in a number of ways. Robots.txt should not be used to prevent search engines from reading pages; doing so is not advised.
This is impossible to accomplish. Making sure that search engines don’t scan the areas of your website that aren’t open to the public is one of the best uses of the robots.txt file. For instance, you can see that the login page (wp-admin) is forbidden if you look at the robots.txt file for this website.
Sitemaps
Inclusion of the Robots.txt file Use an absolute URL when referencing the XML sitemap. The robots.txt file and the URL do not have to be on the same server. Please be aware that a robots.txt file may contain references to several XML sitemaps.
For each subdomain, separate robots.txt files should be created. The limits on crawling imposed by Robots.txt only apply to the subdomain where it is hosted.
If your main website is located on domain.com and your blog is hosted on blog.domain.com, for example, you would need two robots.txt files. The blog’s root directory should hold one, while the main domain’s root directory should hold the other.
Examples of robots.txt files A few examples of robots.txt files are provided below. If one of them does, however, match your needs, copy it into a text file, save it as robots.txt, and upload it to the relevant directory. They are mostly meant to serve as inspiration.
When you first start a blog
On the other hand, as your website expands and you add more material, you’ll probably want more control over how it’s crawled and indexed. If they don’t complete crawling every page on your website in one session, they’ll return and complete it the next time.
You can conserve crawl quota by limiting pointless pages. This is not the most secure method, but it can be used to stop content from showing up in search results. Common Robots.txt File Issues and Solutions You may avoid the most frequent errors with your robots.txt files by being aware of them.
Robots.txt File Missing The most frequent error is having absolutely no robots.txt file. Search engine crawlers will believe that they are free to visit your complete website if you don’t have a robots.txt file. has a Robots.txt file in it If a robots.txt file is absent from the root directory, search engine crawlers won’t be able to visit your website. They will therefore believe they have permission to crawl your entire website as a result. It must be saved as a single text file name in the root directory, not in a subfolder.
URL for sitemap
URL for sitemap is absent A link to your website’s sitemap should always be present in your robots.txt file. The typical mistake of leaving the sitemap URL out of your robots.txt file will help the search engine optimization of your website. staying away from JS and CSS Scour Web advises against blocking CSS and JS files because they are necessary for Google search crawlers to read the website properly.
Your sites won’t be indexed naturally if the bots can’t render them. in Robots.txt, NoIndex In 2019, Google stopped supporting and actively discouraged the use of the noindex robots meta element. You shouldn’t include it in your robots.txt file because of this. If your website still contains the noindex robots meta tag, you should remove it immediately away.
Unsuitable Making use of Wildcards
Unsuitable Making use of Wildcards Incorrect use of wildcards will only prevent you from granting access to the files and folders you intended. Use the only wildcards that are recognized, which are the dollar sign and the asterisk. incorrect file type or extension A robot.txt file must be a text file with the.txt extension, as suggested by its name.
No HTML, images, or other file types are allowed. The output must be in UTF-8 format. A decent place to start is Google’s FAQ and tutorial on robot.txt. Standards Check to determine if anything is preventing crawlers from accessing the areas of your website or the information you want indexed. By using robots.txt, important information shouldn’t be hidden from the SERP. Other pages may still be indexed since these pages may directly link to the page holding the private information.
Use a different tactic, such as password security or the noindex meta directive, to prevent your website from appearing in search results. Multiple logins are permitted by several search engines. Google, for instance, employs Googlebot for natural language searches and Googlebot-picture for image searches. A single search engine’s user agents often adhere to the same guidelines.
As a result
As a result, including rules for various search engine bots is not required, but doing so does provide you the opportunity to improve how the content of your site is evaluated. You can email Google the URL for your robots.txt file if you make changes to it and wish to update it more rapidly. What is a robots.txt file used for?
You can better comprehend the benefits of implementing the robots.txt protocol if you are familiar with how Google crawls websites. There is a crawl budget at Google. This shows how long it will take Google to crawl a certain website. Google determines this budget using a crawl demand and crawl rate cap. Crawls will be slowed down by Google if it determines that speeding up a URL will cause it to load more slowly and make browsing less enjoyable for any organic browsers. This implies that adding fresh content to your website might not be seen by Google as soon, which could harm your SEO.
Demand, which is the second factor in the budget calculation, dictates that Google spiders will frequently visit URLs that are more popular. An alternative position taken by Google is that “you don’t want Google’s crawler to waste crawl budget crawling similar or unimportant pages on your site.” In order to help you prevent this issue, the protocol will give you more control over the positioning and timing of search engine crawlers. You can accomplish the following crucial objectives and steer web crawlers away from the less significant or repetitious pages on your website with the aid of robots.txt.
The emergence
The emergence of duplicate content might be avoided. A website should occasionally purposely contain multiple versions of a piece of information. Duplicate material has a well-known penalty from Google. You could stop that by doing this. Use robots.txt if you are changing parts of your website to stop unfinished pages from being indexed before they are done.
It serves no purpose for Google or other search engines to index these pages because they shouldn’t be found on a search engine. When should robots.txt regulations be used? In order to reduce crawling, websites should often try to use the robots.txt as little as feasible.
A far better method is to improve your website’s architecture and make it clear and crawler-friendly. If these issues cannot be resolved immediately, robots.txt should be utilized as necessary to prevent crawlers from accessing low-quality areas of the website.
Robots.txt should only be used, according to Google, to prevent server problems or improve crawl efficiency, for example, when Googlebot is spending a lot of time examining a region of a site that can’t be indexed.
You might not want the pages listed below to be indexed, for instance: Unorthodox sorting commonly duplicates the content on the main category page on websites with categories. user-generated material that is unrestricted Pages containing private data Internal search sites reduce user experience and waste crawl budget because there may be an infinite number of these result pages.
Non-Authority or Low-Quality Pages Indexed
Your website’s overall analysis can be ruined by non-authority or low-quality pages, which would also lower your SERPs ranking.
These pages are necessary for carrying out specific tasks on your website, but they don’t need to be found by every chance target visitor who comes across your website.
As a result, by placing these pages as hidden directories inside your website that users could access but Search Engines could not crawl, indexing these pages under robots.txt can provide you the overall performance that you anticipated.
A crawl budget restriction occurs when page congestion, duplicate content, and other issues prevent search engine bots from indexing all of your webpages.
The maximum fetching rate for a certain site is constrained by the “Crawl Rate Limit.” To get around these limitations, you can add the URLs of unimportant web pages like thank you pages, shopping carts, and some codes to directories called robots.txt, which would only allow crawlers to view these pages.
The URL inspection in the screenshot below is not authorized to be crawled, hence a message stating that “URL is not available to Google” is displayed. Google is unable to access the URL. Google cannot crawl the aforementioned URL because it is “Blocked by robots.txt.”
Additionally, the key, face-value pages would be much better indexed and provide your website the authority it is anticipated to have in SERPs.
Conclusion
You may stop search engines from indexing pages that aren’t accessible to the general public, like pages in your wp-plugins folder or your WordPress admin folder, by optimizing your robots.txt file. One myth among SEO professionals is the idea that limiting users’ access to WordPress categories, tags, and archive pages can hasten indexing, boost crawl rates, and boost ranks.
That is untrue. Additionally, it is against Google’s webmaster policies. We advise you to generate a robots.txt file for your website using the structure mentioned above. We sincerely hope that this advice has helped you understand how to make your WordPress robots.txt file more SEO-friendly. You might also want to take a look at our comprehensive overview of Scour Web SEO and our ranking of the top WordPress SEO tools for expanding your website. Click here to learn also about HTaccess configuration for SEO
